T
uesday morning at work, everyone was trying to look through me. The whole atmosphere felt different: the long rows of cubicles seemed more penal, the hushed ring tones suggestive of sanitized emergency, the omnipresent
sound of fingers clacking away at keyboards like swarming birds.
I’d stayed home last night. Hayden didn’t say anything unusual when I picked him up, so I guessed the press hadn’t honed in on him yet. I had intended to address the situation with him, honestly I had, but I couldn’t even begin to find the words. So I put him to bed early, then took a Xanax and lay in bed watching TV. I channel surfed past the local ten o’clock news broadcasts, afraid to look.
But now I could tell, just from the way people wouldn’t meet my eyes. I had a unit meeting scheduled for nine o’clock, but at eight forty-five my boss called me into his office. Jim Pendergast was a pretty decent guy, marginally attractive and divorced for a few years. He’d made his availability known to me in subtle ways, without any overt pressure, but I couldn’t get around the idea of dating someone at work. Not that I’d been out on a date for quite a while. A couple of years after we’d moved here, I had gone through a stage where I tried attending some singles functions but I always felt so stupid. The men were either sad or intimidating. And the Internet was just plain frightening. That was four years ago, and I hadn’t really made any efforts since then. Hayden took up a sizable amount of my time, and I got my satisfaction from knowing he was well cared for; at least that was the excuse I used when the nights ran long and sleep wouldn’t come. I told myself I didn’t miss the romantic world and its attendant satisfactions and disappointments, not to a crippling degree. If I was ever going to take the plunge, Jim would certainly have been at the top of the
list of probable targets. Alone at the top, actually. He was a native of the area, and I loved his accent, his hokey colloquialisms; I fully understood that I found him quaint, and I felt the requisite guilt. Jim was constantly out of the office, often caring for his thirteen-year-old son, who had learning disabilities due to an early bout of some childhood disease, I could never recall which one. Tack on some more guilt.
Also in his office was a representative from HR, one of those impeccably dressed girls only a few years out of college, who introduced herself as Susan Myers. I shook her hand and found myself marveling at its cool smoothness. My own knuckles cracked and flaked at the first shadow of winter, and it was already late January.
Jim suggested I sit down.
“I guess I know what this is about,” I began.
Jim raised his eyebrows and picked up this morning’s edition of the
News and Observer
from his desk. “You read it?”
I shook my head and he handed it over.
I hadn’t rated a banner headline, but the article made the front page, just below the photo of soldiers returning to Ft. Bragg from a stint overseas. The accompanying picture was from yesterday afternoon, my face half-shielded from the camera as I climbed into my car. I looked harried, guilty. The headline: SERIAL KILLER’S EX-WIFE LIVING IN TRIANGLE. Beneath it:
Some Still Harbor Doubts About What She Knew and When
. I realized that I was holding the paper with shaking hands.
“You want to take a minute to read it?” Susan Myers asked.
I placed the front page back on Jim’s desk. I smoothed my skirt. “I think I get the gist.”
“I understand they came here looking for you yesterday,” Jim said.
“Jim, this is something I never brought up because it’s a chapter of my life I wanted to remain closed. I’m so sorry if this is causing trouble for anyone here.”
Susan Myers started to say something but Jim cut her off. “Don’t even think of apologizing to me. You’ve worked here for over five years without any blemish, and you’ve been an asset to me personally and to the company as well, on a thoroughly consistent basis. You’ll always have a place here, and if the higher-ups say anything, I’ll go to bat for you. But this guy …” He swiped disdainfully at the paper. “This Pritchett person. He seems to be on something of a mission. My suggestion to you is that you take a week off, get out of town, and let all the fuss die down. Something else will come along for people to flap their lips about.”
Susan Myers had waited patiently, and now she said, “We agree that this is something that should be allowed to fizzle out. We’ve alerted the people in Security to turn away Mr. Pritchett or any media representatives who might show up here to harass you. But it might be less of a distraction for everyone if you took Jim’s advice.”
Suddenly, and for the first time since Pritchett accosted me in the supermarket, I started crying. Not because of any of the awful things that had happened, or the awful possibilities that I felt hovering in the near future, but simply
because my big lug of a boss and this twenty-something girl were being kind and respectful to me. They didn’t say,
But really, you can’t expect anyone to believe that you had no idea that your ex-husband
… They didn’t say,
You must have known
something
was wrong
…
They were both just considerate people, and obviously discomfited by the tears I could no longer hold back. Jim made himself busy looking for tissues, but he didn’t have any, and ended up handing over the napkin from his breakfast, a biscuit and gravy that were still congealing in their foam container on his desk. He hadn’t even had time to finish eating before he called me in. That made me want to cry harder, for some reason, but I managed to stifle it and I dabbed at my face, not making too much of a mess of my makeup. I apologized repeatedly, and both of them told me to stop it. I told them I wanted to at least finish out the day, if only because it would keep me distracted. Susan Myers seemed hesitant but in the end she agreed. She advised me to take care of myself and “go do something fun.”
It worked all right for a little while, until I could no longer ignore the voices of the employees in my department. What is it about cubicles that makes people think they can’t be heard? Such a fake insulation. The seven women and one man in my unit, all of them reliable and sweet and fairly hardworking, were also, unfortunately, unrepentant gossips. Celebrities, people from their churches or neighborhoods, their coworkers … it didn’t matter. All were fair game for rumor and innuendo, and throughout the morning I caught bits and pieces:
Leigh isn’t even her real
name … Well, it’s her middle name at least … She seems more like a Nina … Can you believe what she looked like back then? And her husband, I mean, I hate to say it, knowing what he did and all, but the man
was
pretty hot
… Which was the one that finally sent me fast-walking down the hall to the restroom, heads popping up from behind the cubicle partitions to follow my passage. I retreated to the farthest stall for a real freakout.
Someone had left the front section of today’s paper hung over the handicap bar beside the toilet paper dispenser. Although this was a frequent occurrence, I couldn’t help but think it was meant as a message for me specifically. After a long while, I picked it up.
In large part, the article was simply a recap of Randy’s horrific crimes. It used the nicknames that the press had adorned him with at the time, before the killings were solved: Cross-Eye Killer, Harvester. There was a small side article with bullet points listing the victims by name, along with the dates of their deaths. Or, in the case of Wendy Pugh and Tyler Renault, the dates their bodies were discovered. The story described how Randall Roberts Mosley was eventually shot and captured on the front lawn of his very own home while his wife and infant son looked on.
Sensational.
There was a snapshot of me that I couldn’t recall ever having seen before; it had to have been taken not long after our wedding, but certainly prior to my pregnancy, and my God I did look twenty years younger. In real time, it was
only a little over half that, but I’d learned long ago that “real time” was largely a bullshit concept. Look at that carefree smile on my face, what a stupid fucking child I was, a stupid little girl with no concept of how time could go elastic and speed up or stop altogether. The text featured a brief mention of how “police were led to the house by a call from Mrs. Mosley, who had discovered grisly evidence of her husband’s guilt.” A last photo of me had been thoughtfully included, this one taken from the courthouse steps on the day of my initial testimony. The paper quoted police at the time saying that some suspicion had fallen on me because my picture was found on some of the fake ID documents Randy had hoarded, and my DNA was present at two of the crime scenes. Strands of my hair were identified but the police had quickly concluded that they probably came from Randy’s clothes. The police never charged me with any crime, but that didn’t stop the media from speculating.
I wanted to shake the paper and scream,
He wanted it that way! He set it up to cast doubt!
but of course that wouldn’t help anything so instead I cried some more. Hot tears, shameful ones that vented not the least bit of relief.
The third part of the article was dedicated to Charles Pritchett, a summary of his daughter’s death at Randy’s hands. “I was always bothered by Nina Mosley’s involvement, which was never satisfactorily addressed at the trial,” he was quoted as saying. He spoke eloquently of his years of grief. He said he’d hired a private investigative firm to track me down. He now planned on sticking around until
his questions were answered. “I hate to think this community has a person with her history living in its midst without even being aware of it,” was Pritchett’s penultimate comment. “There are a lot of families with children living here.”
I wanted to hate him. He was very likely going to wreck everything I’d worked to build, to regain from the nightmare swirl of ashes Randy left in his wake. But Carrie Pritchett was only twenty-two when she died, the same age as I was at the time. She was a student, working on her degree in economics. She never got to be twenty-three. Randy gouged out her eyes and wedged smooth agate stones in their place, then left the disfigured body on the floor of her apartment, where some friends discovered it the next morning. They’d come looking because they were concerned that she’d missed an exam.
I heard the bathroom door open. I recognized the voices of two of my workers, Betsy and LaTonya.
“I’d feel better if she hadn’t lied about it,” Betsy was saying. “I mean, anyone could understand, if it wasn’t your fault and all. But the deception, I don’t know.”
“Shit, she’s got a kid. Wouldn’t you change your name?”
“Yeah, I guess so. God, can you imagine? Finding out the man you’ve been sharing your bed with is a murderer?”
“A serial killer, girl. Ain’t like he shot someone for money or something. I heard he was all Ted Bundy.”
I’d been trying to hold back but now a sob caught me by surprise, a hitching sound that echoed off the tile walls. I could almost see them, pointing to the closed stall door I
was hiding behind and mouthing, “Oh, my God,” their faces going red. They didn’t say anything else I could discern, just flushing and then some unintelligible whispers and they were gone.